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Obama’s Man on the Budget: Just 40 and Going Like 60

After a 35-minute run followed by a quick shower, Peter R. Orszag, the 40-year-old White House budget director, is off on his early-morning commute to work.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — At 6 in the morning, Peter R. Orszag is racing: across wet pavement for a 35-minute run, into a shower and a suit, and through a living room that looks rather like an office, the walls painted presidential gold and hung with pictures of federal monuments.

As he heads to his job as White House budget director, he already seems to pulse with energy, but he asks his driver to stop at Starbucks for enormous doses of iced and hot tea. His epic caffeine intake concerned him until he solved the problem with typical Orszagian efficiency: he underwent genetic testing, confirmed that he could safely metabolize large amounts and happily moved on to the next worry.

Mr. Orszag is the youngest member of President Obama’s team holding cabinet rank, a 40-year-old with what colleagues call a graybeard’s knowledge of how the government spends money. But he has little interest in merely keeping fiscal house.

His animating passions are far grander — health care, energy policy and Social Security overhaul, for starters. Everything about the way he has interpreted his new job speaks of ambition: the policy heavyweights he has hired for the Office of Management and Budget, his efforts to persuade cabinet secretaries to let him help shape their plans, a public profile as high as that of any budget director since David A. Stockman’s polarizing tenure under Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago.

“When people are saying this is not how O.M.B. has done things before, I’ve been shrugging my shoulders and saying this is not your father’s O.M.B.,” he said in a recent interview in his office, where a direct phone line to the president was just installed. (He has not yet dared press the little blue button.)

But though colleagues call Mr. Orszag something of a presidential favorite, his relative power among the gigantic personalities on the Obama economic team is still uncertain. Although the budget touches everything, he has no particular subject-area portfolio, and on the topics that most draw his interest, the administration is already well stocked, maybe even overstocked, with expertise and opinions.

A former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Orszag is what passes in the Democratic Party for a deficit hawk. But with the economy requiring a jolt from deficit spending, and with his boss determined to press ahead with expensive domestic initiatives while he has the weight to do so, Mr. Orszag embodies the administration’s awkward fiscal policy positioning: big spending now, with a promise to scrub the budget of waste and a bet that economic recovery and changes to health care will gradually reduce the deficit.

Mr. Orszag’s main job for now is to protect his budget’s journey through Congress, drawing on his years of experience on Capitol Hill, his warm relationships there and his ability to reach deep into detail to make a bargain.

For a dedicated policy wonk, he also spends a lot of time on television. After Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s tax troubles and public speaking blunders, Mr. Orszag was one of several officials dispatched to the airwaves, where he presented the administration’s arguments with a combination of numerical analysis and boyish earnestness.

“He’s made nerdy sexy,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

Mr. Orszag, who grew up in Lexington, Mass., has always worked himself punishingly hard — a legacy, he says, from a math-professor father who glanced at test scores of 98 and asked about the 2 other points. “It was always, ‘When I was your age, I was a tenured professor,’ ” he said.

When he won a Marshall scholarship, his father congratulated him by admitting that the award was “not trivial.” Later he discovered that his father had once been turned down for the prize, which finances graduate study in Britain. (Mr. Orszag earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the London School of Economics.)

In classic political fashion, Mr. Orszag trained for Washington rivalry through family rivalry, not just with his father but also with his economist brothers. Peter, Michael and Jonathan Orszag have worked and written papers together and still compare electronic gadgets and their Princeton grade-point averages.

In Washington, Mr. Orszag’s prowess with numbers has always meant opportunity. As an economist in the Clinton administration, he won the attention of Robert E. Rubin, then the Treasury secretary, by catching him in a math mistake.

Mr. Orszag still plays the geek, passing out propeller hats and jokingly referring to himself as “supernerd.” But nerds are socially inept, and he is anything but. He has worked in Washington on and off since he was 17 — he interned under Pete Rouse, now a senior adviser to the president — and he has intensely political instincts and aspirations.

Friends say his dinner parties are notable for the meticulously chosen wines and the senators who attend. (Mr. Orszag, a divorced father of two, is so cozy with the Capitol Hill crowd that Senator Ron Wyden and his wife, Nancy Bass Wyden, found him a girlfriend.)

And he has a history of transforming green-eyeshade jobs into broader assignments. When he led the Congressional Budget Office, starting in 2007, he became one of the most highly visible directors in its history. He published a well-regarded blog and testified constantly. The C.B.O. puts the official price tag on legislation, traditionally after it is written, but Mr. Orszag persuaded members of Congress and their staffs to consult with him during draft stages.

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Both sides benefited: lawmakers were more likely to receive favorable rulings on cost, and Mr. Orszag became more policy partner than accountant.

Now he has stocked the White House’s budget office with advisers who aspire to shape policy across the administration. They include Cass R. Sunstein, a legal scholar close to Mr. Obama; Jeffrey Liebman, a campaign adviser; Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a heath care expert who is Rahm Emanuel’s brother; and Kenneth Baer, a Clinton administration speechwriter.

Mr. Orszag had a large role in the economic stimulus bill, taking charge of sorting the workable spending ideas from the impractical ones and helping negotiate its final passage on Capitol Hill.

Through that process, several colleagues say, he established his own direct line to the president, without the interference of Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary who, as director of the National Economic Council, controls much of the flow of economic information and policy ideas to Mr. Obama.

Asked about his relationship with Mr. Summers, Mr. Orszag answered politely but stiffened visibly. The two have managed to work together congenially, several administration officials said, and Mr. Summers, known for his sometimes scathing assessment of people, takes Mr. Orszag seriously.

But Mr. Orszag seems to chafe a bit at the situation: Mr. Summers holds a job in which Mr. Orszag was initially interested, and as early as the transition period, Mr. Summers tried to control the budget process as well, by seeking to run meetings related to it.

Mr. Orszag won that battle, and he and others say he is enthused about his role. But as the administration tackles one policy challenge after another, the real test of his power may be the extent to which he can hold his own with Mr. Summers.

So far, his main project has been the budget, drafted in meetings that began before the inauguration. For weeks after Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Orszag sat directly across the table from him in the Roosevelt Room. He began each session with a series of PowerPoint slides, defined the president’s options and constantly jotted down requests on notecards.

For someone with two BlackBerrys — work and personal — clipped to the small of his back, Mr. Orszag seems governed by little cards: the ones in his breast pocket for notes, another that lists his meetings, a tiny hand-lettered one that materializes to summon him to the Oval Office.

Soon he will focus more closely on health care, his central policy obsession. In recent years, many say, he has helped popularize the idea that reducing health care costs is essential to the country’s economic future and the sustainability of the federal budget.

To address the problem, he wants to do no less than change the way medicine is practiced, eliminating unnecessary tests and unproven treatments in favor of what he calls a higher-value approach that he says will actually improve health. But no one quite knows how much money such measures would save, and Republicans already accuse him of trying to limit care.

His own health care conversion occurred when a doctor told him several years ago that he was at risk for cardiovascular problems. Mr. Orszag changed his diet. Each day he eats the same egg whites for breakfast and salad topped with chicken for dinner, all from the White House mess.

He also began training for marathons, sometimes startling colleagues by appearing in their offices at day’s end in head-to-toe spandex.

Now he keeps two books on his desk: the teachings of Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher who espoused dispassion and self-discipline, and “The Strenuous Life,” by Theodore Roosevelt, an ode to pushing oneself as hard as possible.